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The Minoan and Mycenaean Element in Hellenic Life.1 In THE MINOAN AND MYCENAEAN ELEMENT IN HELLENIC LIFE.1 IN his concluding Address to this Society our late President remarked that he cared more for the products of the full maturity of the Greek spirit than for its immature struggles, and this preference for fruits over roots is likely to be shared by most classical scholars. The prehistoric civilization of the land which afterwards became Hellas might indeed seem far removed from the central interests of Greek culture, and it was only with considerable hesitation that I accepted, even for a while, the position in which the Society has placed me. Yet I imagine that my presence in this Chair is due to a feeling on its part that what may be called the embryological department has its place among our studies. Therefore I intend to take advantage of my position here to-day to say something in favour of roots, and even of germs. These are the days of origins, and what is true of the higher forms of animal life and functional activities is equally true of many of the vital principles that inspired the mature civilization of Greece—they cannot be adequately studied without constant reference to their anterior stages of evolution. Such knowledge can alone supply the key to the root significance of many later phenomena, especially in the domain of Art and Religion. It alone can indicate the right direction along many paths of classical research. Amidst the labyrinth of conjecture we have here an Ariadne" to supply the clue. And who, indeed, was Ariadne herself but the Great Goddess of Minoan Crete in her Greek adoptive form qualified as the Most Holy ? 'The chasm,' remarks Professor Gardner, 'dividing prehistoric from historic Greece is growing wider and deeper.'2 In some respects perhaps— but, looking at the relations of the two as a whole, I venture to believe that the scientific study of Greek civilization is becoming less and less possible without taking into constant account that of the Minoan and Mycenaean world that went before it. The truth is that the old view of Greek civilization as a kind of' enfant de miracle ' can no longer be maintained. Whether they like it or not, classical students must consider origins. One after another the ' inventions' attributed by its writers to the later Hellas are seen to have been anticipated on Greek soil at least a thousand years earlier. Take a few almost at random: the Aeginetan claim to have invented sailing vessels, when 1 From the Address of the President delivered to the Hellenic Society, June 1912. 2 J.H.S. xxxi. (1911), p. lix. H.S.—VOL. XXXII. 2n V 278 ARTHUR J. EVANS such already ploughed the Aegean and the Libyan seas at the dawn of the Minoan Age; the attribution of the great improvement in music, marked by the seven-stringed lyre, to Terpander of Lesbos in the middle of the seventh century B.C.—an instrument played by the long-robed Cretan priests of Hagia Triada some ten centuries before, and, indeed, of far earlier Minoan use. At least the antecedent stage of coinage was reached long before the time of Pheid6n, and the weight standards of Greece were known ages before they received their later names. Let us admit that there may have been re-inventions of lost arts. Let us not blink the fact that over a large part of Greece darkness for a time prevailed. Let it be assumed that the Greeks themselves were an intrusive people and that they finally imposed their language on an old Mediterranean race. But if, as I believe, that view is to be maintained it must yet be acknowledged that from the ethnic point of view the older elements largely absorbed the later. The people whom we discern in the new dawn are not the pale-skinned northerners—the'yellow-haired Achaeans' and the rest—but essentially the dark-haired, brown-complexioned race, the ^>otw«e? or 'Red Men' of later tradition, of whom we find the earlier portraiture in the Minoan and Mycenaean wall paintings. The high artistic capacities that distinguish this race are in absolute contrast to the pronounced lack of such a quality among the neolithic inhabitants of those more central and northern European regions, whence ex hypothesi the invaders came. But can it be doubted that the artistic genius of the later Hellenes was largely the continuous outcome of that inherent in the earlier race in which they had been merged ? Of that earlier ' Greece before the Greeks' it may be said, as of the later Greece, capta ferum victorem cepit. It is true that the problem would be much simplified if we could accept the conclusion that the representatives of the earlier Minoan civilization in Crete and of its Mycenaean outgrowth on the mainland were themselves of Hellenic stock. In face of the now ascertained evidence that representatives of the Aryan-speaking race had already reached the Euphrates by the fourteenth century B.C. there is no a priori objection to the view that other members of the same linguistic group had reached the Aegean coasts and islands at an even earlier date. If such a primitive occupation is not proved it certainly will not be owing to want of ingenuity on the part of interpreters of the Minoan or connected scripts. The earliest of the Cretan hieroglyphs were hailed as Greek on the banks of the Mulde. Investigators of the Phaestos Disk on both sides of the Atlantic have found a Hellenic key, though the key proves not to be the same, and as regards the linguistic forms unlocked it must be said that many of them neither represent historic Greek, nor any antecedent stage of it reconcilable with existing views as to the comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages.3 3 I especially refer to some of the strange des Etudes Anciennes T. xiv. (1912), pp. 95, 96. linguistic freaks of Dr. Hempl. Prof. A. Cuny has The more plausible attempt of Miss Stawell faithfully dealt with some of these in the Revue leaves me entirely unconvinced. MINOAN AND MYCENAEAN ELEMENT IN HELLENIC LIFE 279 The Phaestos Disk indeed, if my own conclusions be correct, belongs rather to the Eastern Aegean coastlands than to prehistoric Crete. As to the Minoan Script proper in its most advanced types—the successive Linear types A and B—my own chief endeavour at the present moment is to set out the whole of the really vast material in a clear and collective form. Even then it may well seem presumptuous to expect that anything more than the threshold of systematic investigation will have been reached. Yet, if rumour speaks truly, the stray specimens of the script that have as yet seen the light have been amply sufficient to provide ingenious minds with a Greek—it is even whispered, an Attic—interpretation. For that it is not even necessary to wait for a complete signary of either of the scripts ! For myself I cannot say that I am confident of any such solution. To me at least the view that the Eteocretan population, who preserved their own language down to the third century before our era, spoke Greek in a remote prehistoric age is repugnant to the plainest dictates of common sense. What certain traces we have of the early race and language lead us in a quite different direction. It is not easy to recognize in this dark Mediterranean people, whose physical characteristics can be now carried back at least to the beginning of the second millennium before our era, a youthful member of the Aryan-speaking family. It is impossible to ignore the evidence supplied by a long series of local names which link on the original speech of Crete and of a large part of mainland Greece to that of the primitive Anatolian stock, of whom the Carians stand forth as, perhaps, the purest representatives. The name of Knossos itself, for instance, is distinc- tively Anatolian; the earlier name of Lyttos,—Karnessopolis—contains the same element as Halikarnassos. But it is useless to multiply examples since the comparison has been well worked out by Fick and Kretschmer and other comparative philologists. When we come to the religious elements the same Asianic relation- ship is equally well marked. The Great Goddess of Minoan Crete had sisters East of the Aegean, even more long-lived than herself. The Kory- bantes and their divine Child range in the same direction, and the fetish cult of the Double Axe is inseparable from that of the Carian labrys which survived in the worship of the Zeus of Labraunda. Some of the most characteristic religious scenes on Minoan signets are most intelligible in the light supplied by cults that survived to historic times in the lands East of the Aegean. Throughout those regions we are confronted by a perpetually recurrent figure of a Goddess and her youthful satellite—son or paramour, martial or effeminate by turns, but always mortal, and mourned in various forms. Attis, Adonis or Thammuz, we may add the Ilian Anchises,4 all had tombs within her temple walls. Not least, the Cretan Zeus himself knew death, and the fabled site of his monument on Mount Juktas proves to coincide with a votive shrine over which the Goddess 4 ' Tombs' of Anchises—the baetylic pillar in n.any places, from the Phrygian Ida to the may also be regarded as sepulchral— were erected sanctuary of Aphrodite at Eryx. v 2 280 ARTHUR J. EVANS rather than the God originally presided.
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